Spirituality Newsletter

[Dromio]

Knowing that a good number of people here are very spiritual
people I figured that I would post this message here to alt.callahans.
I have been having a lot of dificulty getting responce on the Internet
(alt.religion.wicca), and I hope that this group will at least give me
one or two responces.

I am starting up a newsletter on spirituality, I will be
covering a lot of ground in this newsletter (hopefully without making
it feel too wattered down), as submissions come in. I have had
intrest indicated for articles on Yoga, Energy work (comparison of
various forms of energy work), pottery (honestly don't know how
related to spirituality as I would like to see it this article would
be, but who knows, maybe it would come out well), the works of Depak
Chopra (or at least one of his works). I hope to have something about
the spiritual aspects of religion, and I do have an article on the
cycles of nature. This of course is largely to give you an idea of
what I think will be coming out in it.

I am looking for submissions to my newsletter, if you have any
ideas please pass them along my way. I HOPE to be getting the first
newsletter out in about 3 weeks (sometime around the next full moon by
the looks of things), but if I have not got anything by then it is
quite possible that I will be pushing that date even further back.
What I really need is submissions about a week before I get the
newsletter into the mail, it is possible that I can get later
sumbissions in the issue that I am working on, but that would all
depend on the ``need'' for the information to be placed into that
particular issue, and where I am in the processing of of the
newsletter when I recieve late submissions.

I think that I have given you enough information about the
newsletter for anyone who may be vaugly intrested to get enough of a
better idea of what I am looking at doing here in order for them (or
should I say you?), to decide if you want more information. So for
more information (or simply a sumbission), you can get in touch with
me one of the following ways...

E-Mail: rra...@awinc.com (the addresss used in this message so you can

just reply)
Fax: (250) 362-9668
Mail: Jason Rasku
Box 270
Rossland BC
V0G 1Y0
Canada

Thank you for taking the time to read this, and I do hope that
some of you are intrested in this and get in touch with me (even
responding to this message with a simple folowup to the newsgroup
would probably catch my attention).

Dromio

--
Intrested in hand made textiles and more?
Visit <http://kootweb.com/trillium/trrasku/trrasku.html>

Anyone who sends me unsolicited mail will be charged A Minimum
of $500 per item handled.

Further the autorities at your site, and any sites which apear
to be suspiciously consipicous by their unusual presence, will
be contacted.

This will exclude honest mistakes...

[John Barnstead]

Dromio (rra...@awinc.com) wrote:

: I am starting up a newsletter on spirituality, I will be

: covering a lot of ground in this newsletter (hopefully without making
: it feel too wattered down), as submissions come in. I have had
: intrest indicated for articles on Yoga, Energy work (comparison of
: various forms of energy work), pottery (honestly don't know how
: related to spirituality as I would like to see it this article would
: be, but who knows, maybe it would come out well), the works of Depak
: Chopra (or at least one of his works).

Pernicious the Musquodoboit Harbour Farm Cat, who, after delivering Lady
Cheron's LARGE DAMP CAKE COVERED WITH GREEN ICING and 145 candles,
stumbled over Dromio's doubts concerning the relation of pottery to
spirituality, is, frankly, shocked, JUST SHOCKED that any of the
Patronage-at-Large could entertain the tiniest lack of faith in the
intimate interconnectedness of these two great areas of human thought and
action. Fortunately for all concerned, he just happens to have (and here
Pernicious draws out from beneath the remains of the LARGE DAMP CAKE
COVERED WITH GREEN ICING a rather hefty, albeit somewhat frosting-smeared,
packet of paper) a modest collection of relevant materials prepared by his
faithful amanuensis and general factotum, which the latter was so careless
as to leave momentarily unattended on the corner of Pernicious's Louis XIV
writing desk... On his way towards the mended oak door, Pernicious pauses
by the WALL to post the materials for the edification of interested
Patrons:

A CENTO FOR JULIAN SCHNABEL

DEDICATION:

Dear Peter Bustin,

I hope you will accept this small tribute from an admirer
of your work. When I first saw your bust of Virginia Woolf at
JWD Bookseller I immediately felt that little frisson of recognition
which one experiences in the presence of art. I commented on the
witty reference to Judy Chicago's Dinner Party in the left hand
corner, but was chagrined to discover I had been only half-witted
myself, for I missed entirely the jibe at Julian Schnabel which
JWD tactfully pointed out to me.
When I was perhaps three years old, I fell and hit my
head on the sidewalk in front of my Grandmother's house at
16591 Greenview Road in Detroit. Later, to console me, she
indicated that the hole in one of the concrete planchets had been
left by my temple. Although I only half believed her even then, in
later years I used to check to see if it was still there. That is how I
feel about your work - the crack which inspired the Kuzmin cup
you made for me only confirms the sentiment. Thank you, Peter,
and my best wishes.


[From Psalm 2, verses 7 through 9].

I will tell of the decree of the LORD:
He said to me, "You are my son,
today I have begotten you.
Ask of me, and I shall make the nations your heritage,
and the ends of the earth your possession.
You shall break them with a rod of iron,
and dash them in pieces like a potter's vessel.




[From the Gospel according to Mark, chapter 14, verses 3 through
9].

And while he was in Bethany at the house of Simon the
leper, as he sat at table, a woman came with an alabaster jar of
ointment of pure nard, very costly, and she broke the jar and
poured it over his head. But there were some who said to
themselves indignantly, "Why was the ointment thus wasted? For
this ointment might have been sold for more than three hundred
denarii, and given to the poor." And they reproached her. But
Jesus said, "Let her alone; why do you trouble her? She has done
a beautiful thing to me. For you always have the poor with you,
and whenever you will, you can do good to them; but you will not
always have me. She has done what she could; she has annointed
my body beforehand for burying. And truly, I say to you,
wherever the gospel is preached in the whole world, what she has
done will be told in memory of her."




[From Gore Vidal, The City and the Pillar]

Sometimes it seemed as if the surface of the world was a
fragile porcelain affair easily shattered, and that beneath the
surface the real, the strange life of people went on.




[From Stephen W. Hawking, A Brief History of Time]

If the laws of science are unchanged by the combination
of operations C and P, and also by the combination C, P, and T,
they must also be unchanged under the operation of T alone. Yet
there is a big difference between the forward and backward
directions of real time in ordinary life. Imagine a cup of water
falling off a table and breaking into pieces on the floor. If you
take a film of this, you can easily tell whether it is being run
forward or backward. If you run it backward you will see the
pieces suddenly gather themselves together off the floor and jump
back to form a whole cup on the table. You can tell that the film
is being run backward because this kind of behaviour is never
observed in ordinary life. If it were, crockery manufacturers
would go out of business.
The explanation that is usually given as to why we don't
see broken cups gathering themselves together off the floor and
jumping back onto the table is that it is forbidden by the second
law of thermodynamics. This says that in any closed system
disorder, or entropy, always increases with time. In other words,
it is a form of Murphy's law: Things always tend to go wrong! An
intact cup on the table is a state of high order, but a broken cup on
the floor is a disordered state. One can go readily from the cup on
the table in the past to the broken cup on the floor in the future,
but not the other way round.


[From A. L. Sadler, Cha-No-Yu, the Japanese Tea Ceremony]

Their purpose was to make Tea vessels, and it is curious
that the name of Satsuma especially should be so widely known in
Europe and America in connexion with a ware of a very different
type. Hideyoshi with his usual shrewdness was not slow to seize
the opportunity offered by Cha-no-yu of encouraging the fashion
for things of no intrinsic value among his vassals the great
Daimyos, for since this value was created by his own connoisseur
Rikyu and soon soared to a huge extent, he found it an easy matter
to reward services to himself with Tea vessels instead of fiefs in
many cases, an example which Tokugawa Ieyasu and his
successors were naturally very pleased to follow. That these
rewards were not always appreciated is evident from the story told
of Matsudaira Tadanao, Lord of Echizen, who was presented with
a Tea-caddy by Hidetada as a mark of appreciation of his victory
in a fight at Osaka, the Shogun telling him that his exploit was
worth a million koku. Tadanao called his men together and
announced the receipt of the Tea-caddy to them, thanking them
for their loyal help to which his success was entirely due.
Unfortunately, he continued, he had nothing to give them but this
piece of pottery, and since it was obviously unfair that they should
not share in his prize he smashed it to pieces and offered to
distribute it them.

* *
*

As an old verse says:
"Leave it as it is
Just as the woodman cuts it,
The wooden lattice.
For sure as it is lacquered
'Twill peel and look
unsightly."
There is a quaint story of the odd monk Ikkyu of the
Daitokuji and the Tea Master Shuko. When Shuko went to study
the Zen philosophy under him Ikkyu made tea for him, but when
he took the bowl and was going to drink it, Ikkyu knocked it out
of his hand with his iron Nyoi sceptre. This was too much for
Shuko, who started up from his seat, whereupon Ikkyu shouted
out "Drink it up!" Shuko then saw the point and, quite equal to
the occasion, retorted "Willows are green and flowers red."
"Good", said Ikkyu, quite satisfied that the other understood.
Which is, being interpreted, things must remain as they are, for
the nature of phenomena cannot be changed anymore than spilt
tea can be drunk.

* *
*

Sho-o was once going to a Cha-no-yu with Rikyu when
he caught sight of a flower vase with two handles in a curio shop.
He thought he would go in and buy it on his way back and did so
only to find that Rikyu had forestalled him. Being invited to a tea
some while after by Rikyu it occured to him that this vase would
be used, and so it turned out, for there it stood in the Tokonoma,
but with one of its handles broken off. "Ah," he said, "then I shall
have no need of the hammer I brought in my sleeve to knock it
off, for I could not bear the idea of it being used with both."

* *
*

There was an odd hermit who lived in Sakai in Izumi
named Ichiro (One Way), who excelled in both Chinese and
Japanese verse. One day the famous priest Ikkyu came to see him
and remarked: "The Way is Universal; why then have you styled
yourself One Way?" "Rest is Universal, isn't it," replied Ichiro,
"then why do you style yourself One Rest (Ikkyu)?" This Ichiro
had a kettle of which he was very fond, and which he called "The
Handy Pot". He used it for making his tea as well as for boiling
his food. This is the comic verse he made about it:
Good old Handy Pot!
Though your mouth sticks out so far
Prithee do not tell
All the various kinds of food
You so kindly cook for me.
He made a window in his garden wall and hung up a
bamboo curtain in front of it. Through this he used to receive the
offerings of those who felt inclined to make them, and so he lived.
But the small boys of the village threw horse-dung and straw
through it for sport, whereupon the hermit exclaimed sadly: "Ah!
this is a degenerate age! I will have no more to do with it." And
after this he took no more food, so that he died. Truly he was an
unworldly fellow.
This "Handy Pot" of his afterwards came into the
possession of Hosokawa Katsumoto, and is no doubt the one that
after many changes of ownership at last came into the hands of
the hermit Zensuke of Awataguchi and was smashed by him
rather than Hideyoshi should get it as he so much desired.

* *
*

There was a Chajin of Sakai who had a Tea-caddy called
Sessan and he used it when Rikyu came. But Rikyu thought
nothing of it so its owner smashed it against the trivet on the
hearth. Another guest took away the pieces and put them together
again and gave a Cha-no-yu to which he invited Rikyu. This time
the Master praised the caddy, so the host returned it to its former
owner and told him to take great care of it. Later on someone
bought it for a thousand pieces of gold, and noticing that the joints
were very rough proposed to have it mended again more neatly
and submitted it to Kobori Enshu for his opinion. "If you do that
you will spoil it altogether," was his decision, "for that was just
why Rikyu liked it."

* *
*

There was a farmer in Rikyu's day named Doroku who
was much given to simple Cha-no-yu, and he absorbed its spirit so
much that he always used to clean his farm implements and
arrange them carefully after use. He had a valuable old Chinese
Tea-caddy, and when he was dying he called his two sons to his
bedside and told them that for their simple style of Tea there was
no need of such a thing while it might become a source of envy
and discord between them after his death, since it had been greatly
admired by Sho-o and Rikyu and would fetch a lot of money. So
he broke it before he became a guest in the White Jade Pavilion.

* *
*

Once when Kato Kiyomasa was going to give a party for
Cha-no-yu he brought out a famous Tea-bowl and put it in the
Tokonoma. This bowl his pages took up and passed round to
examine it, when one of them let it drop and broke it. They were
much dismayed at this accident, but as befitted the sons of
distinguished warriors they bound themselves not to reveal the
culprit whatever might happen. After a while Kiyomasa came in
and when he saw the broken bowl his face darkened. "Who broke
that?" he demanded, "you must know, so you had better say." But
no one answered a word. Kato's expression grew more fierce,
"You young men are a lot of cowards. Behaviour like this is a slur
on the name of your fathers, however brave they may be!"
Then one of the pages named Kato Heizaburo, a boy of
fourteen, looking straight into the face of Kiyomasa, asked him:
"And why is it that you say we are cowards who bring shame on
our fathers' name?" "The reason you will not tell the name of the
one who broke the tea bowl is because you are afraid he will be
condemned to commit seppuku, I suppose," retorted Kiyomasa,
growing even more wroth, "and what is a coward but one who
fears for his life?"
"Among us," replied Heizaburo calmly, "there is not one
who is afraid to die. But the reason why we do not wish to say
who broke the Tea-bowl is because we do not think it right that
one of ourselves, who certainly is of some use, should suffer
anything on account of a Tea-bowl however famous, which can
well be done without. Please consider the matter well. In keeping
the peace of the Empire of what use can a tea utensil be? But if an
enemy should attack us now we should at once hasten to repel him
and to protect our province, holding our lives of no account
whatever and willingly throwing them away in defence of our lord
and his domains. So however great a treasure a Tea-bowl may be,
is it in reason to consider it worth the life of even one of us?"
"That's true," admitted Kiyomasa, overcome with admiration at
this clear and logical defence, "you are a fine lot of young fellows.
You may even become better warriors than your fathers but you
certainly will not be worse. Yes, you are well worthy of my trust."
And he said no more about the Tea-bowl or the one who had
broken it.

* *
*

Nagai Zenzaemon, called Dokyu, a feudatory of the
Tokugawa house, was well known to fame in the field, but for
some reason after the fight at Odawara he took service first with
Gamo Ujisato and after his death with Uesugi Kagekatsu,
eventually retiring to Fukaya in Kazusa. An old friend sent him a
fine Seto Tea-caddy of which he thought a great deal, but
unfortunately one day his waiting maid dropped it and broke it.
Naturally he was irritated and scolded her, and wishing to make
amends she went and brought him a little pot that she had in her
toilet case and asked him to use that instead. Dokyu rather
reluctantly took it as a token of her regret, but attached no
particular value to it. Some little time after this the great Tea
Master Kobori Masakazu happened to pay him a visit and noticed
the pot. Gazing at it in amazement he told Dokyu that it was a
rare one indeed, for it was undoubtedly a genuine Chinese
specimen of a 'Katatsuki'. Dokyu was highly delighted and gave it
the name of Nagai Katatsuki. It afterwards became one of the
treasures of the Tokugawa family.

* *
*

When Hideyoshi was besieging Odawara, Date
Masamune made up his mind to surrender, and rode in to Sagami
with about ten retainers, leaving them there and going on to the
Taiko's camp alone. When he arrived there Hideyoshi refused to
see him for some time, as a mark of his displeasure at
Masamune's dilatoriness. Hearing that Sen-no-Rikyu was in the
camp, Date resorted to him and studied Cha-no-yu. When the
Taiko heard about this he seemed surprised that, since he came
from a far and rather wild country, for he was lord of Sendai in
Mutsu, he was so far polished that he cared about the elegant arts,
and in consequence he determined to receive him.
Masamune was renowned for his unbending disposition
as well as for his boldness and originality. More than anything
else he despised being taken aback or losing self-control. One of
his eyes had been in some way injured and hung out on his cheek,
the appearance of his face in consequence being by no means
pleasant. So one of his friends recommended him to cut it out,
because if he came to grapple with an enemy on the battle-field it
might be seized and he would be in a very awkward position.
Date accordingly took the short knife from his sword scabbard and
cut it out, but as he did so he gave an involuntary exclamation.
"That will never do," said his companion, "if you have no more
self control than that you will never become a great general".
Masamune felt very much ashamed of himself and swore that it
should never occur again. Once he was admiring a famous Tea
bowl, turning it over caressingly in his hands, when it almost fell
to the ground and he gave an involuntary start. "Ah," he said,
"though I have learned never to flinch on any occasion in battle,
not to speak of other occasions, yet I find myself starting like this
from fear of smashing a Tea bowl because it may be worth a
thousand kwan. This will never do!" And he took the bowl and
flung it down on the stones, smashing it into a hundred fragments.



[From Okakura Kakuzo, The Book of Tea].

He only who has lived with the beautiful can die
beautifully. The last moments of the great tea-masters were as full
of exquisite refinement as had been their lives. Seeking always to
be in harmony with the great rhythm of the universe, they were
ever prepared to enter the unknown. The "Last Tea of Rikiu" will
stand forth forever as the acme of tragic grandeur.
Long had been the friendship between Rikiu and the Taiko-
Hideyoshi, and high the estimation in which the great warrior
held the tea-master. But the friendship of a despot is ever a
dangerous honour. It was an age rife with treachery, and men
trusted not even their nearest kin. Rikiu was no servile courtier,
and had often dared to differ in argument with his fierce patron.
Taking advantage of the coldness which had for some time existed
between the Taiko and Rikiu, the enemies of the latter
accused him of being implicated in a conspiracy to poison the
despot. It was whispered to Hideyoshi that the fatal potion was to
be administered to him with a cup of the green beverage prepared
by the tea-master. With Hideyoshi suspicion was sufficient
ground for instant execution, and there was no appeal from the
will of the angry ruler. One privilege alone was granted to the
condemned - the honour of dying by his own hand.
On the day destined for his self-immolation, Rikiu invited his
chief disciples to a last tea-ceremony. Mournfully at the
appointed time the guests met at the portico. As they look into the
garden path the trees seem to shudder, and in the rustling of their
leaves are heard the whispers of homeless ghosts. Like solemn
sentinels before the gates of Hades stand the grey stone lanterns.
A wave of rare incense is wafted
from the tea-room; it is the summons which bids the guests to
enter. One by one they advance and take their places. In the
tokonoma hangs a kakemono, - a wonderful writing by an ancient
monk dealing with the evanescence of all earthly things. The
singing kettle, as it boils over the brazier, sounds like some cicada
pouring forth his woes to departing summer. Soon the host enters
the room. Each in turn is served with tea, and each in turn
silently drains his cup, the host last of all. According to
established etiquette, the chief guest now asks permission to
examine the tea-equipage. Rikiu places the various items before
them with the kakemono. After all have expressed admiration of
their beauty, Rikiu presents one of them to each of the assembled
company as a souvenir. The bowl alone he keeps. "Never again
shall this cup, polluted by the lips of misfortune, be used by man".
He speaks, and breaks the vessel into fragments.
The ceremony is over; the guests with difficulty restraining
their tears, take their last farewell and leave the room. One only,
the nearest and dearest, is requested to remain and witness the
end. Rikiu then removes his tea-gown and carefully folds it upon
the mat, thereby disclosing the immaculate white death robe
which it had hitherto concealed. Tenderly he gazes on the shining
blade of the fatal dagger, and in exquisite verse thus addresses it:
"Welcome to thee,
O sword of eternity!
Through Buddha
And through Dharuma alike
Though hast cleft thy way".
With a smile upon his face Rikiu passed forth into the
unknown.



[From Eugene Vanderpool, Ostracism at Athens].

The Greek word ostrakon has two meanings, a shell and, by
analogy, an earthenware vessel or a fragment of such a vessel,
which may often resemble a shell. Scholars of earlier generations
were in doubt as to which of these two meanings was intended in
the case of ostraca used in voting at an ostracism, and George
Grote's words in his classic History of Greece, written just over a
hundred years ago, illustrate their uncertainty: "The process of
ostracism was carried into effect by writing upon a shell or
potsherd the name of the person whom a citizen thought it
prudent for a time to banish; which shell, when deposited in the
proper vessel counted for a vote towards the sentence." There is
no longer any doubt, of course, for since Grote's time thousands of
actual ostraca have been found and none is a shell; all are
potsherds.
These potsherds are found in a great variety of kinds, shapes
and sizes and they come from all sorts of pots. About 40% are
from plain jars or pitchers. Semi-glazed kraters or lekanai form
another very large category, about 23% of the whole. This very
common type of pot was the standard mixing bowl of the period
and must have been in use in every household, rich or poor.
Pieces of broken ones will always have been ready to hand, and
their firm finished surfaces with dull black glaze inside and glaze
wash outside make them ideal for writing. Fragments of fine
black-glazed vases of various shapes make up the third large
category, about 27% of the whole. Skyphoi, kraters, amphorae and
the like are found, but by far the most common of the black-glazed
shapes is the kylix.





[From Philip K. Dick, Galactic Pot-Healer].

And then he saw it. Saw the pot. In the rays of his torch.
"What's wrong?" Mali said in alarm; he had ceased rising.
"I have to go back," he said.
"Don't let it draw you down! That's the terrible thing it does;
its valence works on you. Climb." She tore her hand away from
his and, kicking vigorously, ascended past him, toward the surface
above. Her legs kicked as if she were trying to shake loose some
binding substance, something which mired her down here.
"You go on up," Joe said. He sank, lower and lower, his eyes
never leaving the pot. And steadily he focused his torch on it. It
had coral around it, but, for the most part, it remained uncovered.
As if, he thought, it was waiting here for me. Trying to ensnare
me, the best possible way... through the thing I love most.
"Mali hesitated above him, then reluctantly descended until
she was parallel with him. "What -" she began, and then she too
saw the pot; she gasped.
"It's a volute krater," Joe said. "Very large." Already he
could distinguish colors emanating from it toward him, the colors
which bound him more firmly to this spot than all the cords and
seaweed, all the other snares. He sank. And sank some more.
"What can you tell about it?" Mali asked. They had almost
reached the pot; Joe's arms extended themselves as if acting on
their own will. "Is it -"
"Not earthenware," Joe said. "It's been fired past five
hundred degrees centigrade. It may even have been fired at a
temperature as high as twelve-hundred-and-fifty degrees. There's
a great deal of vitrification over and above the glaze." Now he
touched it. Carefully he tugged at it. But the coral held it tight.
"Stoneware," he decided. "Not porcelain; it's not translucent. The
white of the glaze makes me think - as a guess - that it's a stannic
oxide compound. If so it would then be a majolica ceramic piece.
Tin-enameling, it's generally called. Like the Delft ceramic
offerings." He rubbed the surface of the pot. "From the feel, I'd
say it's sgraffito ware, with a lead glaze. See? The pattern has
been incised through the slip, disclosing the body color beneath.
As I say, this is a volute krater... but with it here we can probably
expect to find psykters and amphoras as well; it's just a question of
removing the coral deposits and seeing what's below."
"Is it a good pot?" Mali asked. "I mean, to me it looks
unique; I think it's terribly pretty. But in your expert opinion-"
"It's superb," he said, simply. "The red glaze is probably
from reduced copper; it passed through a reducing atmosphere in
the kiln. And ferrous iron. Look at the black. And the yellow, of
course, is obtained from antimony. Which produces an excellent
yellow." The color of glaze, he reflected, which attracts me the
most. The yellows, the blues. I will never change.
He thought, It's almost as if someone put this here for me to
find. He rubbed the surface, on and on, appreciating it by tactile
sense-impressions, rather than sight. Cupric oxide blues, he said
to himself. This pot has everything but that. Did Glimmung have
this put here? he asked himself.
To Mali he said, "Has coral been removed from this?
Recently? It seems strange it wasn't completely covered."
For a time Mali poked about the pot, examining its surface
and that of the coral holding it from below. As she did so he
studied the design on the pot. A complex and ornate scene, more
ornate even than the istoriato style of Urbino. What did the scene
show? He studied it, pondering. Not all of the design was visible.
And yet - he was accustomed to filling in missing segments
removed from pottery pieces. What does this tell? he asked
himself. A story, but of what? He peered.
"I don't like the amount of black on it," Mali said, all at
once. "Anything black down here undermines my sense of
security." She floated away from the pot, her examination over.
"Now can we go back up?" she asked. Her tension had become
even greater; it grew with each tick of the clock. "I'm not going to
stay down here and extinguish my life voluntarily for one damn
dumb pot. Pots just aren't that important."
Joe said, "What did your examination show?"
"Coral has been stripped from it within the last six months."
She broke a section of coral away, revealing more of the pot. "I
can finish the job in a few minutes, when I have my tools."
Now he saw more of the design. The first panel showed a
man seated alone in a bleak and empty room. The next, an
intersystem spacecraft of commercial design. The third showed a
man - evidently the same man - fishing; it showed him lifting a
huge black fish from the water. That was where the black glaze
which Mali objected to came in: the enormous fish. The next
panel he could not see. Coral blocked his view. But something
came after the lifting up of the giant black fish. Lifting the fish
was not the end. There was at least one more panel and perhaps
two.
"This is a flambe glaze," Joe said absently. "As I said before,
of reduced copper. But in some places it looks almost like `dead
leaf' glaze; if I didn't know better I'd-"
"You pedantic fop," Mali said savagely. "You miserable
nitwit. I'm going up." She kicked away, rose, unfastened the
cable which connected them, and was soon gone, her torch
flashing above him. He found himself alone with the pot and the
nearby Black Cathedral. Silence. And the utter abstention of
activity. No fish moved near him; they seemed to shun the Black
Cathedral and its environs. They are wise, he decided. As is
Mali.
He took one last, long, lonely look at the dead structure, the
cathedral which had never been alive.
Bending over the pot he took hold with both hands and
tugged mightily, his torch temporarily put aside. The pot broke
into many pieces; the pieces drifted away in the ocean currents
and he found himself gazing down at the few still-imprisoned
fragments.
Bracing himself he grasped a remaining fragment and tore it
forward, where the whole pot had been. The consolidated coral
hung back; it kept its seizure of the fragment active. And then, by
degrees, the coral released the fragment. It came loose in his
hands, and at once he flailed for the surface above.
He held in his hand the remaining two panels of the visual
narrative. They ascended with him, held tight.
Presently he broke through to the surface. He slid aside his
mask, and floated about, examined the two panels by torch light.
"What is it?" Mali called, swimming toward him with long,
lean strokes.
"The rest of the pot," he said raspingly.
The first panel showed the great black fish swallowing the
man who had caught it. The second - and final - panel revealed
the great fish once again. This time it devoured and absorbed a
Glimmung... or rather the Glimmung. Both the man and
Glimmung disappeared down the throat of the fish, to be
decomposed within its stomach. The man and Glimmung ceased.
Only the great black fish remained. It had engulfed all.
"This potsherd-" he began, and then broke off. There was
something that he had failed to see at first glance. That
something now gathered his attention; it tugged at him, drawing
him restlessly, impotently toward it.
In the latter panel a talk balloon had been incised above the
fish's head. Words filled the talk balloon, words in his own
language. He read them haltingly as he bobbed about upon the
uneasy water.

Life on this planet is underwater, not on the land. Do not get
involved with the fat fake calling himself Glimmung. The depths
draw from the earth, and within those depths the real Glimmung
can be found.

And then, in very small letters, these words at the edge of the
terminal panel.

This has been a public-service message.






[From Yasunari Kawabata, Palm-of-the-Hand Stories].

At a corner in the town was a curio shop. And between the
road and the front of the shop stood a ceramic statue of the
Buddhist deity Kannon. The statue was about the size of a twelve-
ear-old girl. When the train went by, the cold skin of the Kannon
shivered slightly, along with the glass door of the shop. Every
time I passed by the shop, I worried that the statue might tumble
into the road. So this is the dream I had:

The Kannon's body was falling directly toward me. The Kannon
suddenly thrust out its long, ample, white arm and wrapped it
around my neck. I sprang back - from the uncanniness of its
inanimate arm alone coming to life and the cold touch of ceramic
skin.
Without a sound, the Kannon shattered to bits beside the road.
A girl picked up some of the pieces. She stooped a bit,
hurriedly gathering the scattered, glittering ceramic shards. I was
startled to see her appear. As I opened my mouth to offer some
excuse, I woke up.
It had all seemed to happen in the instant after the Kannon had
fallen.

I tried to interpret this dream.
"Give honor unto the wife as unto the weaker vessel" - this
verse from the Bible often came to mind back then. I always
associated the words "weaker vessel" with a porcelain vessel.
And, further, I associated them with the girl in the dream.
A young girl falls easily. In one sense, loving is in itself the
falling of a young girl. That is what I thought.
And so, in my dream, might not the girl have been hurriedly
gathering the shards of her own fall?




[From Yasunari Kawabata, Thousand Cranes]

Dinner, from a near-by caterer, was uninteresting, exactly what
one would have expected.
Kikuji's teacup was the cylindrical Shino bowl. The maid
brought it to him as usual. He noticed, and Fumiko's eyes too
were on it. "You have been using that bowl?"
"I have."
"You shouldn't." He sensed that she was not as
uncomfortable as he. "I was sorry afterward that I'd given it to
you. I mentioned it in my letter."
"What did you say?"
"What... Well, I apologized for giving you a bad piece of
Shino."
"It's not a bad piece at all."
"It can't be good Shino. Mother used it as an ordinary
teacup."
"I don't really know, but I'd imagine that it's very good
Shino." He took the bowl in his hand and gazed at it.
"There is much better Shino. The bowl reminds you of
another, and the other is better."
"There don't seem to be any small Shino pieces in my
father's collection."
"Even if you don't have them here, you see them. Other
bowls come to your mind when you're drinking from this, and you
think how much better they are. It makes me very sad, and
Mother too."
Kikuji breathed deeply. "But I'm moving farther and farther
from tea. I have no occasion to see tea bowls."
"You don't know when you might see one. You must have
seen much finer pieces."
"You're saying that a person can give only the finest?"
"Yes." Fumiko looked straight at him, affirmation in her
eyes. "That is what I think. I asked you in my letter to break it
and throw away the pieces."
"To break it? To break this?" Kikuji sought to divert the
attack that bore down upon him. "It's from the old Shino kiln,
and it must be three or four hundred years old. At first it was
probably an ordinary table piece, but a long time has gone by
since it became a tea bowl. People watched over it and passed it
on - some of them may even have taken it on long trips with them.
I can't break it just because you tell me to."
On the rim of the bowl, she had said, there was a stain from
her mother's lipstick. Her mother had apparently told her that
once the lipstick was there it would not go away, however hard
she rubbed, and indeed since Kikuji had had the bowl he had
washed without success at that especially dark spot on the rim. It
was a light brown, far from the color of lipstick; and yet there was
a faint touch of red in it, not impossible to take for old, faded
lipstick. It may have been the red of the Shino itself; or, since the
forward side of the bowl had become fixed with use, a stain may
have been left from the lips of owners before Mrs. Ota. Mrs. Ota,
however, had probably used it most. It had been her everyday
teacup.
Had Mrs. Ota herself first thought of so using it? Or had
Kikuji's father? Kikuji wondered.
There had also been his suspicion that Mrs. Ota, with his
father, had used the two cylindrical Raku bowls, the red and the
black, as everyday "man-wife" teacups.
His father had had her make the Shino water jar a flower
vase, then - he had had her put roses and carnations in it? And he
had had her use the little Shino bowl as a teacup? Had he at such
times thought her beautiful?
Now that the two of them were dead, the water jar and the
bowl had come to Kikuji. And Fumiko had come too.
"I'm not just being childish. I really do wish you would
break it. You liked the water jar I gave you, and I remembered
the other Shino and thought it would go with the jar. But
afterward I was ashamed."
"I shouldn't be using it as a teacup. It's much too good."
"But there are so many better pieces. You'll drink from this
and think of them. I'll be very unhappy."
"But do you really believe that you can't give away anything
except the finest pieces?"
"It depends on the person and the circumstances."
The words had rich overtones.
The desire, the plea, that only the finest be left to recall her
mother came across to Kikuji. It came as the finest of emotions,
and the water jar was its witness.
The very face of the Shino, glowing warmly cool, made him
think of Mrs. Ota. Possibly because the piece was so fine, the
memory was without the darkness and ugliness of guilt.
As he looked at the masterpiece it was, he felt all the more
strongly the masterpiece Mrs. Ota had been. In a masterpiece
there is nothing unclean.
He looked at the jar and he wanted to see Fumiko, he had
said over the telephone that stormy day. He had been able to say
it only because the
telephone stood between. Fumiko had answered that she had
another Shino piece, and brought him the bowl.
It was probably true that the bowl was weaker than the jar.
"I seem to remember that my father had a portable tea chest.
He used to take it with him when he went traveling," mused
Kikuji. "The bowl he kept in it must be much worse than this."
"What sort of bowl is it?"
"I've never seen it myself."
"Show it to me. It's sure to be better. And if it is, may I
break the Shino?"
"A dangerous gamble."
After dinner, as she dexterously picked seeds from the
watermelon, Fumiko again pressed him to show her the bowl. [...]

Unable to sleep, Kikuji waited for light through the cracks in
the shutters, and went out to the cottage.
The broken Shino lay on the stepping stone before the stone
basin.
He put together four large pieces to form a bowl. A piece
large enough to admit his forefinger was missing from the rim.
Wondering if it might be somewhere on the ground, he
started looking among the stones. Immediately he stopped.
He raised his eyes. A large star was shining through the
trees to the east.
It was some years since he had last seen the morning star.
He stood looking at it, and the sky began to cloud over.
The star was even larger, shining through the haze. The
light was as if blurred by water.
It seemed dreary in contrast to the fresh glimmer of the star,
to be hunting a broken bowl and trying to put it together.
He threw the pieces down again.
The evening before, Fumiko had flung the Shino against the
basin before he could stop her.
He had cried out.
But he had not looked for the pieces in the shadows among
the stones. He had rather put his arm around Fumiko, supporting
her. As she fell forward in the act of throwing the Shino, she
seemed herself about to collapse against the basin.
"There is much better Shino," she murmured.
Was she still sad at the thought of having Kikuji compare it
with better Shino?
He lay sleepless, and an echo of her words came to him,
more poignantly clean in remembrance.
Waiting for daylight, he went out to look for the pieces.
Then seeing the star, he threw them down again.
And looking up, he cried out.
There was no star. In the brief moment when his eyes were
on the discarded pieces, the morning star had disappeared in the
clouds.
He gazed at the eastern sky for a time, as if to retrieve
something stolen.
The clouds would not be heavy; but he could not tell where
the star was. The clouds broke near the horizon. The faint red
deepened where they touched the roofs of houses.
"I can't just leave it," he said aloud. He picked up the pieces
again
and put them in the sleeve of his night kimono.
It would be sad to leave them there. And besides, Kurimoto
Chikako might come calling.
He thought of burying the bowl beside the stone basin,
because Fumiko had broken it there in such obvious desperation.
Instead, he wrapped the pieces in paper, put them in a drawer, and
went back to bed.



[From Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Dichtung und Wahrheit].

Die Meinigen erzahlten gern allerley Eulenspiegeleyen, zu
denen mich jene sonst ernste und einsame Manner angereizt. Ich
fuhre nur einen von diesen Streichen an. Es war eben Topfmarkt
gewesen, und man hatte nicht allein die Kuche fur die nachste
Zeit mit solchen Waaren versorgt, sondern auch uns Kindern
dergleichen Geschirr im Kleinen zu spielender Beschaftigung
eingekauft. An einem schonen Nachmittag, da alles ruhig im
Hause war, trieb ich im Gerams mit meinen Schusseln und
Topfen mein Wesen, und da weiter nichts dabey heraus kommen
wollte, warf ich ein Geschirr...




Our family liked to tell of all sorts of waggeries to which I
was enticed by these otherwise grave and solitary men. Let one of
these pranks suffice for all. A crockery fair had just been held,
from which not only our kitchen had been supplied for a while
with articles for a long time to come, but a great deal of small gear
of the same ware had been purchased as playthings for us
children. One fine afternoon, when everything was quiet in the
house, I whiled away the time with my pots and dishes in the
Frame, and finding that nothing more was to be got out of them,
hurled one of them into the street. The Von Ochsensteins, who
saw me so delighted at the smash it made, that I clapped my
hands for joy, cried out, "Another". I was not long in
flinging out a pot, and as they made no end to their calls for more,
by degrees the whole collection, platters, pipkins, mugs and all,
were dashed upon the pavement. My neighbours continued to
express their approbation, and I was highly delighted to give them
pleasure. But my stock was exhausted, and still they shouted,
"More". I ran, therefore, straight to the kitchen, and brought the
earthenware, which produced a still livelier spectacle in breaking,
and thus I kept running backwards and forwards, fetching one
plate after another as I could reach it from where they stood in
rows on the shelf. But as that did not satisfy my audience, I
devoted all the ware that I could drag out to similar destruction. It
was not till afterwards that any one appeared to hinder and save.
The mischief was done, and in place of so much broken crockery,
there was at least a ludicrous story, in which the roguish authors
took special delight to the end of their days.





[From Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing: The Enigma, p. 54]

During this period of 1 1/2 hours punishment was
normally carried out by pupils. Our studies at Westcott House
were down a long corridor with studies on either side shared by
from 2 to 4 boys. On this particular evening during this silent
period, we heard footsteps come up the corridor, a knock on a
door, a mumble of voices and then two lots of footsteps come up
the corridor to the locker/washroom, then we heard the swish of a
cane, a crash of crockery and a loaf as cane connected with
bottom, this was stroke one, exactly the same happened on the
second stroke, by that time me and my companions were splitting
our sides with laughter. What happened was Turing on his back
stroke had knocked down some tea making crockery belonging to
prefects, he did this on two consecutive strokes and from the noise
we could all tell what was going on in the washroom, the third
and final stroke did not connect with crockery as by that time it
was lying shattered on the floor.



[From Abram Terts, ].

Lonely from infancy, amidst relatives, amidst friends, lonely
amidst the high society which tumbles at her feet, lonely on walks,
by the window, with her beloved books, she is the chosen one, and
in that capacity is led by Pushkin by the hand between the Scylla
of wasted feelings (Tatiana is to belong to Onegin) and the
Charybdis of familial tawdriness (if only she is lucky enough to
marry a general). What do we see? - Scylla met with Charybdis
and they devoured each other, leaving her unharmed, virginal, a
chosen one like a nun given neither to the one nor to the other, but
only to a third, only to Pushkin, who was wiley enough to preserve
himself like a vessel, in which not a drop was spilled or dried up
or grew old or soured, and now the cup of pure femininity she, the
chosen one, offers to her chosen one and protege.

[From Aleksandr Pushkin, " "].

Out of her fingers the urn must have slipped and burst on a
boulder.
Sorrowing there she sits, holding the useless shell.
Lo! from the jagged urn the jet springs still, and the maiden
Over an endless flow leans in unending dismay.


[From Aleksandr Pushkin, An Outline for a Tale of Roman Life]

The first evening, such-and-such from among us were there; the
Greek philosopher has disappeared - Petronius smiles - and recites
an ode (an excerpt). (We find Petronius with his physician. - He
continues his discussion of kinds of death, chooses a warm bath
and blood), a description of the preparations. He bandages the
wound, and the telling of anecdotes commences 1 / About
Cleopatra; our discussions of the matter. 2d evening, Petronius
gives orders to break a precious goblet, dictates Satyricon,
discussions about the fall of man, the fall of God, the general lack
of faith, and Nero's prejudices. A Christian slave...



[From Sam Driver, Pushkin: Literature and Social Ideas]

On the second evening, Petronius is to break an expensive cup,19
dictate The Satyricon, and give his opinions on the state of man
and society (including Nero).

19That is, the myrrhine vase, which figures in Pliny's account of
Petronius, and is one of the reasons for ascribing great wealth to
Petronius as well as proud lineage and high position. [...]





[From Christopher Isherwood, Down There On A Visit].

"I could have stayed at Cambridge forever. I even think that I'd
have liked being a don. I could have been one, you know. I came
up with a very good scholarship. And my tutor said I was the
most promising man of my year."
"Then why -?" I began, and checked myself as I realized that
this probably meant he'd been sent down.
"England's impossible," Ambrose snapped - at first rather
confirming my suspicions. "I'm never going back there. Never.
Whatever happens." He gave me a challenging, hostile look, as if
he expected me to protest, patriotically or otherwise. When I
didn't, he continued: "I had such heavenly rooms. That part of the
college is eighteenth century, and the old ceiling was still in, with
the original moldings. And my windows looked out on the Backs.
I did the sitting room over in emerald green - I don't know how it
would look to one nowadays, but then it was madly fashionable -
and I had nothing but green china; and I always kept green apples
in a bowl on the table. Then I had a pair of Pamela Bianco
engravings. And a really good marquetry bureau. And a lot of
Venetian glass, which I loved because it had belonged to my
grandmother, whom I adored. She left it to me when she died... I
was very proud of my fireplace; I got someone to come in and
copy a design onto it - it was one
of Vanessa Bell's book jeckets for the Hogarth Press - all
crisscrosses and curlicues. Oh, and there was a lovely old carpet
which came from the Turkish Embassy in Paris... The whole place
was just my idea of heaven. So utterly perfect. Every morning,
when I got out of bed and came in there for breakfast, I said to
myself, this is too beautiful -
"And you know, that was exactly what it was? Too beautiful.
Too beautiful to be true. Because, you see, it wasn't true. I'd been
living in a fool's paradise. I simply hadn't realized how horrible
everything is - how really obscene people are - below the surface.
They pretend to be so nice and friendly. And all the time, they're
swine - swine - and how they hate, hate, hate everything they
don't understand -
"This was in the Michaelmas term of 1923 - when it
happened... I'd been to a dinner party - it was at the Master's
Lodge. A dreadfully dull party, actually. Of course, one couldn't
refuse; but I'd have much rather stayed in my rooms and read. I
remember, I'd just discovered Ronald Firbank, and I couldn't put
him down -
"Well, I got back - it was about eleven, I suppose - and I opened
the door, and I just couldn't believe my eyes. That's what
everybody says, I know. But what I mean is, I just couldn't
explain to myself what I was seeing. It was so utterly improbable.
Like a very elaborate surrealist joke. I might have been looking at
some sort of insane collage in an art gallery - it wasn't like
anything that actually happens to oneself. . . Of course, after the
first shock, I realized that it had happened. It had happened to me
-
"The entire place was wrecked - literally everything. They'd
broken all the china, all the glass. They'd smeared some filth on
the walls, and over the pictures. They'd even found my little
eggcup that I loved so. It was a present on my fourth birthday;
and I kept it hidden away in a cupboard, because it didn't go with
the color scheme. But I loved it all the more, because nobody but
me ever saw it. Well, they'd taken it out - this little bit of my
childhood - and they'd smashed it. How could they have known
that I'd mind that most of all?
"For a long while I just stood there, staring at it all. I was quite
numb. I didn't feel anything. But then I began to be furious -
really furious. I'd never known what it was to hate like that
before. I felt as if everything - all my past life - had been smeared
with their dirt. They'd put their filthy hands on it. And now I
never, never wanted to have anything to do with it again. I
suppose it was childish and hysterical of me, but I picked up a
plate which they hadn't properly smashed, and I threw it on the
floor and stamped on it.
"Of course, the next day I felt the whole thing much more,
even. What I couldn't stop being amazed at was that these people
- whom one had imagined never thought about one, or were even
aware of one's existence - that they'd actually loathed one, without
one's dreaming of it. That was so uncanny. It made me realize
that I didn't understand Cambridge or England at all. I might as
well have been living among a lot of Eskimos. We just didn't
make sense together."
"So what did you do?"
"What was there to do?"
"You might at least have found out who'd done it."
"Oh, I knew that. There was a club in our college - hearties
from the rugger fifteen and the college boat and so forth. They'd
done this to several other people already. Wasn't it dreadful of me
- I'd known that and I hadn't cared particularly? I'd just vaguely
supposed the others had brought it on themselves. Made
themselves obnoxious, somehow."
"Couldn't you have all got together and done something to
these swine?"
"I suppose so, if one had all been Joans of Arc and William
Tells, instead of me and a handful of terrified little men with the
wrong accent, from the wrong schools. . . . But even if one could
have wrecked the hearties' rooms, it wouldn't have been the same
thing. They had nothing in them but photographs of themselves
in teams, and brass toasting forks engraved with the college
crest."
"So you never even said anything to them?"
"Only to one. One of them did come round the next day and
offer me a check for the damage. He'd signed it already, and he
told me to fill in the amount - any amount I liked. I know I was
horrid to him, but I just couldn't control myself. I'm afraid I
screamed at him. I told him that he and his friends thought they
could buy themselves out of anything. And that they probably
could, most of the time. But that there'd always be a few people,
like me, who knew they were scum; and nothing they could do
would ever change that. And that in the end they'd get to know it
for themselves; and then all the things they'd bought for
themselves with their filthy money would be no good to them.
They'd know they were scum and they'd die knowing it. . . And
then I tore the check to bits, and told him to get out."
"Oh - marvelous!"
"Except that he was quite sweet, actually. I found out later
he'd been prepared to pay the whole lot himself. He hadn't told
the others he was coming to see me. I think he was really sorry.
But of course, that couldn't have interested me less at the time. I
loathed him so much I hardly even noticed what he looked like.
In fact, I couldn't see anything around me any more; not even the
college buildings and the places I used to love so. They'd all
disappeared into a kind of fog of hate. . . That was when I made
up my mind to die -" Ambrose uttered his apologetic little laugh.
Several tears had run down his face while he was telling this
story; he wiped them away now, quite unashamedly, with his very
dirty silk handkerchief. "The day you arrived, I told you I was
dead. You didn't understand what I meant, did you? I meant, I'm
dead as far as England and everybody in it is concerned. I got my
guardian to let me leave Cambridge at once. And, as soon as I
was twenty-one and had my own money, I cleared out of England.
I've never been back. I never write. I never read their filthy
newspapers. I have nothing more to do with them. I'm dead -"



[From Christopher Isherwood, A Meeting by the River].

I told you in my last letter that Olly was going to introduce me
to the Mahanta, the head of this Monastery. It was a memorable
experience. The Mahanta lives in a little separate house on the
river-embankment, built probably by Europeans, for it has a very
French-looking fountain in the middle of its garden. The fountain
is supported by three stone swans and by two cupids. The swans
are all right from a Hindu point of view, because they stand for
spiritual discrimination between the Real and the Unreal, but the
cupids do seem a bit carnal for these monastic surroundings -
however, one of them has lost his head, so is perhaps rendered
hors de combat! Unfortunately, the fountain has been allowed to
fall into disrepair, it doesn't work and its bowl is full of green
scum, and the garden is carelessly looked after, if at all. There are
rose-bushes, and I suddenly pictured you so clearly, in your shawl
and gardening gloves, snipping and pruning! You could restore
and transform the whole place within a few months, and, even in
its present run-down state, I know it would appeal to you. You'd
love to sit on the stone water-stairs - at the bottom of which
discarded leaf-plates and broken earthenware cups are joggled up
and down by the river-waves. And of course you would sketch the
passing boats.



[From Vladimir Nabokov, Pnin].

"He is a biochemist and is now in Pittsburgh," said Betty as she
helped Pnin to arrange buttered slices of French bread around a
pot of glossy-gray fresh caviar and to rinse three large bunches of
grapes. There was also a large plate of cold cuts, real German
pumpernickel, and a dish of very special vinaigrette, where
shrimps hobnobbed with pickles and peas, and some miniature
sausages in tomato sauce, and hot pirozhki (mushroom tarts, meat
tarts, cabbage tarts), and four kinds of nuts, and various
interesting oriental sweets. Drinks were to be represented by
whisky (Betty's contribution), ryabinovka (a rowanberry liqueur),
brandy-and-grenadine cocktails, and of course Pnin's Punch, a
heady mixture of chilled Chateau Yquem, grapefruit
juice, and maraschino, which the solemn host had already started
to stir in a large bowl of brilliant aquamarine glass with a
decorative design of swirled ribbing and lily pads.
"My, what a lovely thing!" cried Betty.
Pnin eyed the bowl with pleased surprise as if seeing it for the
first time. It was, he said, a present from Victor. Yes, how was
he, how did he like St. Bart's? He liked it so-so. He had passed
the beginning of the summer in California with his mother, then
had worked two months at a Yosemite hotel. A what? A hotel in
the Californian mountains. Well, he had returned to his school
and had suddenly sent this.
By some tender coincidence the bowl had come on the very day
Pnin had counted the chairs and started to plan this party. It had
come enclosed in a box within another box inside a third one, and
wrapped up in an extavagant mass of excelsior and paper that had
spread all over the kitchen like a carnival storm. The bowl that
emerged was one of those gifts whose first impact produces in the
recipient's mind a colored image, a blazoned blur, reflecting with
such emblematic force the sweet nature of the donor that the
tangible attributes of the thing are dissolved, as it were, in this
pure inner blaze, but suddenly and forever leap into brilliant being
when praised by an outsider to whom the true glory of the object is
unknown. [...]
Presently, guests with full plates drifted back into the parlor.
The punch was brought in.
"Gracious, Timofey, where on earth did you get that perfectly
divine bowl!" exclaimed Joan.
"Victor presented it to me."
"But where did he get it?"
"Antiquaire store in Cranton, I think."
"Gosh, it must have cost a fortune."
"One dollar? Ten dollars? Less maybe?"
"Ten dollars - nonsense! Two hundred, I should say. Look at
it! Look at this writhing pattern. You know, you should show it
to the Cockerells. They know everything about old glass. In fact,
they have a Lady Dunmore pitcher that looks like a poor relation
of this."
Margaret Thayer admired it in her turn, and said that when
she was a child, she imagined Cinderella's glass shoes to be
exactly of that greenish blue tint; whereupon Professor Pnin
remarked that, primo, he would like everybody to say if contents
were as good as container, and secundo, that Cendrillon's shoes
were not made of glass but of Russian squirrel fur - vair, in
French. It was, he said, an obvious case of the survival of the
fittest among words, verre being more evocative than vair which,
he submitted, came not from varus, variegated, but from veveritsa,
Slavic for a certain beautiful, pale, winter-squirrel fur, having a
bluish, or better say sizily, columbine, shade - from columba,
Latin for "pigeon," as somebody here well knows - so you see,
Mrs. Fire, you were, in general, correct."
"The contents are fine," said Laurence Clements.
"This beverage is certainly delicious," said Margaret Thayer.
("I always thought `columbine' was some sort of flower," said
Thomas to Betty, who lightly acquiesced.) [...]
From the sideboard and dining-room table Pnin removed to the
kitchen sink the used china and silverware. He put away what
food remained into the bright Arctic light of the refrigerator. The
ham and tongue had all gone, and so had the little sausages; but
the vinaigrette had not been a success, and enough caviar and
meat tarts were left over for a meal or two tomorrow. "Boom-
boom-boom," said the china closet as he passed by. He surveyed
the living room and started to tidy it up. A last drop of Pnin's
Punch glistened in its beautiful bowl. Joan had crooked a lipstick-
stained cigarette butt in her saucer; Betty had left no trace and had
taken all the glasses back to the kitchen. Mrs. Thayer had
forgotten a booklet of pretty multicolored matches on her plate,
next to a bit of nougat. Mr. Thayer had twisted into all kinds of
wierd shapes half a dozen paper napkins; Hagen had quenched a
messy cigar in an uneaten bunchlet of grapes.
In the kitchen, Pnin prepared to wash up the dishes. He
removed his silk coat, his tie, and his dentures. To protect his
shirt front and tuxedo trousers, he donned a soubrette's dappled
apron. He scraped various tidbits off the plates into a brown paper
bag, to be given eventually to a mangy little white dog, with pink
patches on its back, that visited him sometimes in the afternoon -
there was no reason a human's misfortune should interfere with a
canine's pleasure.
He prepared a bubble bath in the sink for the crockery, glass,
and silverware, and with infinite care lowered the aquamarine
bowl into the tepid foam. Its resonant flint glass emitted a sound
of muffled mellowness as it settled down to soak. He rinsed the
amber goblets and the silverware under the tap, and submerged
them in the same foam. Then he fished out the knives, forks, and
spoons, rinsed them, and began to wipe them. He worked very
slowly, with a certain vagueness of manner that might have been
taken for a mist of abstraction in a less methodical man. He
gathered the wiped spoons into a posy, placed them in a pitcher
which he had washed but not dried, and then took them out one by
one and wiped them all over again. He groped under the bubbles,
around the goblets, and under the melodious bowl, for any piece of
forgotten silver - and retrieved a nutcracker. Fastidious Pnin
rinsed it, and was wiping it, when the leggy thing somehow
slipped out of the towel and fell like a man from a roof. He
almost caught it - his fingertips actually came into contact with it
in midair, but this only helped to propel it into the treasure-
concealing foam of the sink, where an excruciating crack of
broken glass followed upon the plunge.
Pnin hurled the towel into a corner and, turning away, stood
for a moment staring at the blackness beyond the threshold of the
open back door. A quiet, lacy-winged little green insect circled in
the glare of a strong naked lamp above Pnin's glossy bald head.
He looked very old, with his toothless mouth half open and a film
of tears dimming his blank, unblinking eyes. Then, with a moan
of anguished anticipation, he went back to the sink and, bracing
himself, dipped his hand deep into the foam. A jagger of glass
stung him. Gently he removed a broken goblet. The beautiful
bowl was intact. He took a fresh dish towel and went on with his
household work.
When everything was clean and dry, and the bowl stood aloof
and serene on the safest shelf of the cupboard, and the little bright
house was securely locked up in the large dark night, Pnin sat
down at the kitchen table and, taking a sheet of yellow scrap paper
from its drawer, unclipped his fountain pen and started to
compose the draft of a letter:



[From James Merrill, "The Broken Bowl"].


To say it once held daisies and bluebells
Ignores, if nothing else,
Much diehard brilliance where, crashed to the floor,
The wide bowl lies that seemed to cup the sun,
Its green leaves wilted, its loyal blaze undone,
All spilt, its glass integrity no more.
From piece to shattered piece
A fledgling rainbow struggles for release.

Did also the heart shatter when it slipped?
Shards flash, becoming script,
Imperfection's opal signature
Whose rays in disarray hallucinate
At dusk so glittering a network that
The plight of reason, ever shakier,
Is broadcast through the room
Which rocks in sympathy, a pendulum

No lucid, self-containing artifice
At last, but fire, ice,
A world in jeopardy. What lets the bowl
Nonetheless triumph by inconsequence
And wrestle harmony from dissonance
And with the fragments build another, whole,
Inside us, which we feel
Can never break, or grow less bountiful?

Love does that. Spectral through the fallen dark,
Eye-beam and ingle-spark
Refract our ruin into this new space,
Timeless and Concentric, a spotlight
To whose elate arena we allot
Love's facets reassembling face by face,
Love's warbler among leaves,
Love's monuments, or tombstones, on our lives.



[From James Merrill, "Charles on Fire"].

Another evening we sprawled about discussing
Appearances. And it was the concensus
That while uncommon physical good looks
Continued to launch one, as before, in life
(Among its vaporous eddies and false calms),
Still, as one of us said into his beard,
"Without your intellectual and spiritual
Values, man, you are sunk." No one but squared
The shoulders of his own unloveliness.
Long-suffering Charles, having cooked and served the meal,
Now brought out little tumblers finely etched
He filled with amber liquor and then passed.
"Say," said the same young man, "in Paris, France,
They do it this way" - bounding to his feet
And touching a lit match to our host's full glass.
A blue flame, gentle, beautiful, came, went
Above the surface. In a hush that fell
We heard the vessel crack. The contents drained
As who should step down from a crystal coach.
Steward of spirits, Charles's glistening hand
All at once gloved itself in eeriness.
The moment passed. He made two quick sweeps and
Was flesh again. "It couldn't matter less,"
He said, but with a shocked, unconscious glance
Into the mirror. Finding nothing changed,
He filled a fresh glass and sank down among us.



[From James Merrill, Peru: The Landscape Game]

Our cub plane growls and quivers for the pounce. K has
fallen asleep, out of simple nervous tension. It is still dark. Lima
twinkles under its habitual dense ceiling.
The luggage label of the Hotel Perichole is a much
reduced page from the Offenbach score.
There. We're off.

Last night after dinner a white-haired lady from Zurich
had us play the psychological game in which each person
describes a house he then leaves in order to take an imaginary
walk. One by one he discovers a key, a bowl, a body of water, a
wild creature, and finally a wall. Free association is invited at any
stage, and nothing explained until the last player has spoken.
The house is your own life, your notion of it. Trees
round about stand for Other People.
The key is Religion. The bowl, Art. The water, Sex.
The wild thing is Yourself - the unconscious.
The wall is Death.
Our companion, K decided, had to be Jung's widow. She
noted our replies on a paper napkin:

K - apartment whose vine-covered terrace overlooks
a piazza with fountains;
small gold key, to a lost diary?
goblet of iridescent glass, quite undamaged,
which he kneels to fill at
a clear deep river;
a polar bear - K runs away;
high brick wall, complete with electrified alarm
system, enclosing the estate of an industrial
magnate.

J - Victorian house, many rooms, gingerbread, topiary
garden;
key to grandfather clock;
mixing bowl, cracked - fearing botulism, I kick
it out of my path;
a pond stagnant in appearance but full of
activity: lily pads, tadpoles, buzzing dragonflies;
a racoon, masked, washing its little black hands
on the far side - it runs away;
stone wall exactly my height, over which appear
eaves and chimney of a house much like the one I started out
from.

"Are you sure you haven't played this game before?"
asked the Frau Doktor, not unreasonably. Yet she interpreted our
answers at length, scanning our faces for the intelligence we were
too far gone to muster.
"What was it your bowl meant?" K yawned, up in the
room.
"I'm a good mixer. But liable to go to pieces."




[From Alfred, Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam].

Something it is that thou hast lost,
Some pleasure from thine early years.
Break, thou deep vase of chilling tears,
That grief hath shaken into frost!



[From W. H. Auden, "As I Walked Out One Evening"].

`The glacier knocks in the cupboard,
The desert sighs in the bed,
And the crack in the tea-cup opens
A lane to the land of the dead.'



[From Mary Renault, The Mask of Apollo].

I gave him his own letter, and the one for Plato. He put down
my constraint, I think, to bad news I brought, for he read
Archytas' letter standing; then, reassured, he offered my wine.
The cup was Italian, the painting touched up with white, like his
gift at Delphi. Memories crowded me: the crane, Meidias' death
cry, the battle at Phigeleia, my father as Cassandra, the great
theatre at Syracuse where Aischylos put on The Persians,
Menekrates saying, "It's all one under the mask". The cup shook
in my hand. As one learns to do, I steadied it. He had been
putting back the jug, and noticed nothing.
Raising his cup, he said, "To the fortunes of Syracuse. A
glorious dawn, Zeus prosper it".
I held myself in, and answered slowly, "Shall we offer the
prayer of Hippolytos, Grant me to end life's race as I began?"
"Choose," he said, smiling, "some prayer of better omen, for,
as I remember, that one the gods rejected".
"I see you know your Euripides. Well then a toast to purified
Syracuse. Down with all riffraff - hired troops, spies, gluttons and
drunkards, whores, and artists." I lifted the cup, and threw it
down on the marble floor.
I had not known I would do this. The wine made a great red
star, and spattered both our robes. A piece of the cup lay at my
feet, a crowned goddess, in the Italian style.
He stood stock-still, amazed, then angry. Sicilians of his rank
don't know such things can happen to them. Well, I thought, he is
talking to an Athenian now, and must make the best of it.
"Nikeratos," he said, "I am sorry to see you so forget yourself".
"Forget?" I answered. "No, by Apollo, I have remembered
what I am. I am a citizen of no rank; I don't understand
philosophy; when you were studying, I was playing stand-ins and
extras, picking up my trade which you want to take away. But
whatever I am, or you choose to call me, one thing I know: I am a
servant of the god, and though I honor you and love you, I will
obey the god, rather than you."
He had listened unmoving; but at these words he started, as if
he knew them. I waited, but he did not speak.
"You have been godlike to me." If I had let myself, I could
have wept. "But beside the god you are just a man. Farewell. I
daresay we shan't meet again." I paused at the door, but there was
nothing to stay for, so I only said, "I am sorry I broke the wine
cup."



[From Mary Renault, The Praise Singer].

From the day of that first supper in Hipparchos' house, I was
Athenian in my heart, so far as a wanderer belongs to any city.
All I had lost in Ionia was here, distilled and refined; the painted
walls, the slender-legged tables, the couches with their fine
embroidered cushions, the clean well-mannered boys who served
food and wine; everywhere elegance, nowhere ostentation. No
flaunting Samian gold-work; but, exquisitely painted, the first
service in red-figure I'd ever seen. Or, for that matter, the
Athenian diners either - yes, that would make men smile today! It
was Hipparchos who had inspired it.
Answering our compliments, he said, "I was in Exekias' shop.
He painted me that wine-cooler, which I don't think will displease
me however fashions change. That day, however, I was there to
order a small dedication to Eros." The handsome youth (a new
one) who shared his couch, returned his glance with charm, but
no vulgar simpering, and touched his wine-cup, doubtless
inscribed with "The Beautiful" and his name. "I had attended to
that, and was idling about the shop, when I heard the master
roaring at a pupil who'd been working, it seemed, industriously in
his corner. People say my curiosity will be the death of me
someday." He turned on us his winning smile. "So I went over,
in time to hear the culprit told that if he thought he had all day to
spend in foolery, he had better make room for someone else who'd
value his place. By now, I was craning over Exekias' shoulder.
The young man was holding an oil-jar, on which he'd drawn a
Greek and a Phrygian dueling. As you'll have guessed, he had
amused himself by painting the background black, and reserving
the figures. It was the very best Ilissos clay, that bakes a soft
glowing red. Seeing Exekias just about to dash it to the ground,
or maybe at his pupil's head, I caught back his arm, crying, `Fire
it! Fire it, my friend, and let us see. And don't have a brush laid
on that cup I ordered, until I have had a look.'"
His friend toasted him in it, very tastefully; he was not merely
presentable but exceedingly well-bred.
"And after that, nothing would content me but to set something
of the kind before all my friends. If you care for them, pay me the
compliment of accepting them and taking them home."
"Of course, nothing else was talked of, as men showed their
cups to one another. Thessalos's, which was lewd but witty, was
passed right round the room. I am sure not a guest but was at a
potter's next morning; in no time at all the young Psiax, whose
fortune had been made in that one evening, had set up his own
shop. My cup had Apollo on his tripod, playing the lyre; I kept it
forty years, till some fool of a porter broke it.




[From Alexander Pope, The Rape of the Lock]


The Peer now spreads the glitt'ring Forfex wide,
T'enclose the Lock; now joins it, to divide.
Ev'n then, before the fatal Engine clos'd,
A wretched Sylph too fondly interpos'd;
Fate urg'd the Shears, and cut the Sylph in twain,
(But Airy Substance soon unites again)
The meeting Points the sacred Hair dissever
From the fair Head, for ever, and for ever!
The flash'd the living Lightning from her Eyes,
And screams of Horror rend th'affrighted Skies.
Not louder Shrieks to pitying Heav'n are cast,
When Husbands or when Lapdogs breathe their last,
Or when rich China Vessels, fal'n from high,
In glitt'ring Dust and painted Fragments lie!




[From Thomas Tryon, Harvest Home]

Her eyes fell on my sketchbook. "How's the paintin'
comin'?" I assured her I was working hard at it, and had a New
York gallery swindled into handling my work.
"You any good?"
"Probably not."
"You're a liar." She beamed behind her glasses. "Let me
see."
She leafed through the book, murmuring approval; then uttered a
little gasp as her hand flew to her breast. I saw she had come
upon the page of tombstones I had drawn yesterday. "My, my,
'course you're good. Dear me. Clemmon's stone." Gazing at the
rendering of the grave marker, she seemed a trifle overwrought.
"Aye, there's where dear Clem sleeps." Closing the sketchbook,
she set it aside, and took the chair opposite me, stirring her tea
with a small silver spoon. "Clem bought me these cups the year
we was married. The whole set, and not a one broken, not even a
chip." She lifted the cup, staring thoughtfully at it for a moment,
then sipped. [...]
"Here, now -" She drew back from me as though to mantle
herself in the shadows. I reached in my pocket and produced the
scrap of paper with the writing over the skull and bones. "There's
a warning the Soakeses supposedly left him in the woods - only it
wasn't from the Soakeses, it was from you!" I turned it over and
laid it before her. "Does that look familiar?" I reached to the
shelf above the sink and grabbed a box from it. Tea sprayed
around me as I tore out the liner and spread it beside the piece of
foil paper, whose silvery reflection had caught my eye by Jack
Stump's fire. "Read it."
"Can't see without my specs," she said truculantly.
"You don't have to see. You can feel it." I seized her fingers
and pressed them on the foil lining. "Weber's teas. Embossed.
With `One-B' -- remember?" I turned Jack's message over and
pressed her fingers there, on the identical foil, embossed the same
way. "One-B Weber's."
"I don't expect I'm the only person to use Weber's tea."
"You have to send for it -- remember? To London. You
used one of those scraps from your kitchen spindle to write the
note, and had it put in Jack's trap, the traps you moved yourself."
She pulled her hand away; I seized her arm and gripped it. "Jack
Stump was in the woods all right, and you didn't want him there
any more than the Soakeses did. But you decided to do something
about it. You caught him, you and the other women over at Irene
Tatum's for a quilting party. He wasn't rolled in the ashes from
Soakes's still, but in the ashes from Irene's soap kettle. Then you
cut his tongue out. With these." I yanked my hand from my
pocket, raised it, and brought it down. The teacup and saucer
broke as the pair of rusty shears struck them.
"There's your missing scissors, Mary, and you didn't leave
them at Asia Minerva's house. You lost them in the woods when
you attacked Jack. You were looking for them the day we hunted
mushrooms. After you cut off his tongue, you took your needle
and thread and stitched his mouth up. You planned it all, the
quilting party at Irene Tatum's house, all of it."
She looked at me across the broken pieces of the cup,
something defiant in her eyes. "First time you ever called me
`Mary'. Seems strange. People don't call me that much. Clem
used to, of course -- Robert sometimes." One hand came from her
lap and touched a fragment of china. "Aye, Jack was a talker.
And a meddler, and that's a bad combination in any soul, man or
woman. Tamar put the quietus to him." [...]
She stared at the shattered cup and saucer. [...] The light
etched her features; she looked haggard, worn, as she began
picking up the shattered pieces of the blue teacup. "Clem bought
me them cups the year we was married. All these years, and not a
one of 'em broke. Till now. I don't s'pose I can mend it, can I?"
She thought a moment. Then: "No," she concluded, "some things
is forever past mendin'." One by one she laid the broken pieces in
the saucer.


[From Mikhail Kuzmin, , ]
.
A slave brought the vase which had just been purchased,
where Bacchantes danced in a garland and Achilles spun in
women's garb amidst his servant girls; examining it with
unaccustomed curiosity, Eulogius said quietly:
"I could break it with a motion of my hand, yet it may
outlive my children and grandchildren and the memory of them."
Jotting down the price, he gave orders about planting
autumn flowers and, accompanied by his shepherd dog, moved
away with a light gait, leaving me confused and
uncomprehending.


[From Mikhail Kuzmin, ].
.
The dark blue cup flashed meteor-like through the pale
blue sky, leaving a shining parabola in its wake. The white gleam
of a saucer's underside followed hard upon it. Clearly, a
trembling hand had imparted their zigzag capriciousness, but it
seemed unlikely that anyone had deliberately taken aim at the stiff
headgear of the abbe, rosy as a doll, who chose that particular
moment to raise his head. The smiling expression of the round
and unclouded doll-face was suddenly transformed into a mask to
ornament a drain, the more so as cafe au lait trickled from the
pipes of the plush curling brim onto the pear of the nose. Having
wiped his face, he was on the point of breaking once more into a
smile, but instead with a preoccupied air removed his hat, in
which a deep blue shard had lodged like a cockade. One could
positively have sworn that Terzina had taken throwing lessons
from some antique discobulos. For some time I had been about to
enter the cool doorway, but on hearing the singer's voice raised as
if she were rolling the roulades of some aria at the San-Cassiano
theatre, I had stopped to let the storm pass, knowing from
experience that such stroms were of brief duration. The eructation
of deep blue I had not foreseen. Glancing at the witness of this
scene, that is, at me, the abbe announced, in a manner both
sprightly and aggrieved, "I shall go up and demand an
explanation! I hold holy office, and my hat is a brand new one.
What's more, I'm a poet! The Signorina is unaware of these
things." "She's in a temper," I said in an attempt to dissuade him,
"If you have business with her, call in forty minutes time and
you'll be able to laugh together, she'll offer you fresh chocolate
and, who knows, may even sing something if she doesn't have a
rehearsal at the San-Cassiano.
.

[From Paul Monette, Lightfall]

They grabbed him like an animal, pinning his arms and legs.
They drove him back against the Carrere mantel, where one of
them reached down a Tudor candlestick and brained him. He
slumped to the hearth. Two of the robed, bald cultists stood at his
head and feet like acolytes. The third smashed a Celadon vase
and slit his throat with a sharp-edged piece. As he bled him like a
chicken, the rest of the crowd got up and shuffled off to fetch their
cocoa. Only these three men were in the forefront. [...]
Of course she knew these Indians. Now she remembered the
dusty case in the town hall: the shards of broken pots, the swatch
of weaving, the doll in the eagle-feather dress. She knew now she
was one of them. She had lived out a life among her kind, on the
thin edge between forest and sea. She had buried her father down
here - a lover, a sister, a hundred more. She was sure, if she went
up now, she could locate the square of land where she'd pitched
her two-poled tent. She could almost see what lay about inside -
an old black bearskin, a stack of painted bowls - [...]


[From Thomas McEvilley, The Case of Julian Schnabel]

One of the characteristic motifs that recent art has used
to portray relations between self and history is fragmentation. A
whole aesthetics of the fragment has developed. This motif is
central to Schnabel's oeuvre, appearing most obviously in the so-
called plate paintings. In these works a wooden ground is
prepared by fixing broken ceramic ware to it with Bondo. Some
shards lie convexly, some concavely, some stand out at an oblique
or right angle. Paint and a variety of other materials are applied
over this ground. Some critics have felt that the images that
appear on these grounds are less important than the grounds
themselves. It is in any case true that whatever image appears in
these works must lie upon that ground, and that the ground itself
is the signifier through which the image must be seen and
understood. The ground contains the images not only physically
but in their meaning.
The first significance of the crockery ground is its
brokenness. It presents an underlying condition of brokenness as
the screen onto which any and all images must be projected. This
brokenness, while by no means identical to Pollock's allover drip
ground, is related to them. After a period when awareness of their
content was repressed, the drip grounds have rightly been
recognized as cosmograms signifying, roughly, the dissolution of
all things into one another. They are metaphors for a state of
ontological non-rigidity in which the identities of things are
continually reprocessed through a single vast flowing continuum
like Heraclitus's river. The individual identity of a part is
submerged beneath the massive statement of the process as a
whole. Schnabel's ground of broken shards comes from Pollock,
but mediated by the discontinuous grounds of Rauschenberg's
combines and collages, where separate entities momentarily form
out of the flux of images, then break apart by its ambient surges
and tugs. Schnabel's ground of shards is broken first, fluid
second. Figures seen upon it are fragmented by the underlying
brokenness of the ground of being. It is not a Modernist
postulation of a whole and enduring selfhood that is presented in
these works, but a feeling of fragmentation. The plate paintings
are related, for instance, though with different feeling and tone, to
Tony Cragg's use of fragments to build up decentred figures, or to
Kounellis's use of fragments to suggest the brokenness of cultural
norms in the late modern world.
But the significance of Schnabel's ceramic-shard ground
goes beyond fragmentation. Lay one of these paintings down on
the ground, rather than hanging it on the wall, and it ceases to be
a painting and becomes a sculptural representation of an
archeological site, particularly of neolithic and bronze age sites
which are characterized above all by the massing of broken
ceramic shards sticking out of the ground at all angles. The Mud
in Mudanza 1982 most directly and clearly conveys this content.
The ground is itself an image. It is the loam of history that lies
there among the gaping vessels that seem to come from another
age. It is the dissolving and fertilizing ground of the past on
which we raise our brief constructions, which are equally to be
broken down into the death-and-life swamp of the archeological
rubbish dump. The themes that surge and flow through the
tumultous grounds are: history, the rise and fall of cultures, their
relativity, time as seedbed of both past and future, the feeling of
history flowing like a sewer, and so on. The fact that the shards
are not really from ancient ceramic wares (though in some cases,
like The Mud in Mudanza, they look that way) but contemporary
ones, usually brand new from the stores and sometimes still
bearing labels or price tages, focuses the onslaught of ravaging
time onto our own moment. It is our own dream of history that is
sinking into the broken scrap heap of the past before our eyes.
Images that appear on such a screen are almost transparent. They
seem to hover in front of the ground, already broken, scattered,
decentred. They peer at us not as they were when they were
themselves, but as the broken relics of selves that could not hold
together through the storm of time, that were broken down in the
crucible of nature to be reprocessed into other things. This, not
heroic selfhood, is the basic ingredient of the iconography of the
plate paintings.





.


[From James Merrill, A Different Person, p. 235]:

"I met a woman," said Robert, "whose husband did
business with the sultan of something-or-other. Over the years
she made friends with the Swiss lady in charge of the sultan's
household. One day they were strolling through this endless
storehouse of china and glass, you know, Limoges and Baccarat,
and my friend said, `What became of your lovely dessert service,
two hundred pieces of pale-green opaline?' `Oh well, you see,' the
Swiss lady said, `it is wicked to value things for themselves. By
strict Moslem law, any household possession that hasn't been used
in a given year must be destroyed. We called in the men and had
it smashed to bits.' Like a wife past childbearing, I suppose..."
Robert's voice trailed off.


[From Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, pp.
87-88]:

Then another time we went to Rome and we brought back a
beautiful black renaissance plate. Maddalena, the old italian
cook, came up to Gertrude Stein's bedroom one morning to bring
the water for her bath. Gertrude Stein had the hiccoughs. But
cannot the signora stop it, said Maddalena anxiously. No, said
Gertrude Stein between hiccoughs. Maddalena shaking her head
sadly went away. In a minute there was an awful crash. Up flew
Maddalena, oh signora, signora, she said, I was so upset because
the signora had the hiccoughs that I broke the black plate that the
signora so carefully brought from Rome. Gertrude Stein began to
swear, she has a reprehensible habit of swearing whenever
anything unexpected happens and she always tells me she learned
it in her youth in California, and as I am a loyal californian I can
then say nothing. She swore and the hiccoughs ceased.
Maddalena's face was wreathed in smiles. Ah the signorina, she
said, she has stopped hiccoughing. Oh no I did not break the
beautiful plate, I just made the noise of it and then said I did it to
make the signorina stop hiccoughing.

Gertrude Stein is awfully patient over the breaking of
even her most cherished objects, it is I, I am sorry to say who
usually break them. Neither she nor the servant nor the dog do,
but then the servant never touches them, it is I who dust them and
alas sometimes accidentally break them. I always beg her to
promise to let me have them mended by an expert before I tell her
which it is that is broken, she always replies she gets no pleasure
out of them if they are mended but alright have it mended and it is
mended and it gets put away. She loves objects that are breakable,
cheap objects and valuable objects, a chicken out of a grocery shop
or a pigeon out of a fair, one just broke this morning, this time it
was not I who did it, she loves them all and she remembers them
all but she knows that sooner or later they will break and she says
that like books there are always more to find. However to me this
is no consolation. She says she likes what she has and she likes
the adventure of a new one. That is what she always says about
young painters, about anything, once everybody knows they are
good the adventure is over. And adds Picasso with a sigh, even
after everybody knows they are good not any more people really
like them than they did when only the few knew they were good.


[From Henry James, The Golden Bowl]:

(pp. 79-85) The dealer waived the question - he practically
disposed of it by turning straightway toward a receptacle to which
he had not yet resorted and from which, after unlocking it, he
extracted a square box, of some twenty inches in height, covered
with worn-looking leather. He placed the box on the counter,
pushed back a pair of small hooks, lifted the lid and removed from
its nest a drinking-vessel larger than a common cup, yet not of
exorbitant size, and formed, to appearance, either of old fine gold
or of some material once richly gilt. He handled it with
tenderness, with ceremony, making a place for it on a small satin
mat. "My Golden Bowl," he observed - and it sounded, on his
lips, as if it said everything. He left the important object - for as
"important" it did somehow present itself - to produce its certain
effect. Simple, but singularly elegant, it stood on a circular foot, a
short pedestal with a slightly spreading base, and, though not of
signal depth, justified its title by the charm of its shape as well as
by the tone of its surface. It might have been a large goblet
diminished, to the enhancement of its happy curve, by half its
original height. As formed of solid gold it was impressive; it
seemed indeed to warn off the prudent admirer. Charlotte, with
care, immediately took it up, while the Prince, who had after a
minute shifted his position again, regarded it from a distance.
It was heavier than Charlotte had thought. "Gold, really
gold?" she asked of their companion.
He hesitated. "Look a little, and perhaps you'll make
out."
She looked, holding it up in both her fine hands, turning
it to the light. "It may be cheap for what it is, but it will be dear,
I'm afraid, for me."
"Well," said the man, "I can part with it for less than its
value. I got it, you see, for less."
"For how much then?"
Again he waited, always with his serene stare. "Do you
like it then?"
Charlotte turned to her friend. "Do you like it?"
He came no nearer; he looked at their companion.
"Cos'è?"
"Well, signori miei, if you must know, it's just a perfect
crystal."
"Of course we must know, per Dio!" said the Prince. But
he turned away again - he went back to his glass door.
Charlotte set down the bowl; she was evidently taken.
"Do you mean it's cut out of a single crystal?"
"If it isn't I think I can promise you that you'll never find
any joint or any piecing."
She wondered. "Even if I were to scrape off the gold?"
He showed, though with due respect, that she amused
him. "You couldn't scrape it off - it has been too well put on; put
on I don't know when and I don't know how. But by some very
fine old worker and by some beautiful old process."
Charlotte, frankly charmed with the cup, smiled back at
him now. "A lost art?"
"Call it a lost art."
"But of what time then is the whole thing?"
"Well, say also of a lost time."
The girl considered. "Then if it's so precious, how comes
it to be cheap?"
Her interlocutor once more hung fire, but by this time the
Prince had lost patience. "I'll wait for you out in the air," he said
to his companion, and, though he spoke without irritation, he
pointed his remark by passing immediately into the street, where,
during the next minutes, the others saw him, his back to the shop
window, philosophically enough hover and light a fresh cigarette.
Charlotte even took, a little, her time; she was aware of his funny
Italian taste for London street-life.
Her host meanwhile, at any rate, answered her question.
"Ah, I've had it a long time without selling it. I think I must have
been keeping it, madam, for you."
"You've kept it for me because you've thought I mightn't
see what's the matter with it?"
He only continued to face her - he only continued to
appear to follow the play of her mind. "What is the matter with
it?"
"Oh, it's not for me to say; it's for you honestly to tell me.
Of course I know something must be."
"But if it's something you can't find out, isn't it as good as
if it were nothing?"
"I probably should find out as soon as I had paid for it."
"Not," her host lucidly insisted, "if you hadn't paid too
much."
"What do you call," she asked, "little enough?"
"Well, what should you say to fifteen pounds?"
"I should say," said Charlotte with the utmost
promptitude, "that it's altogether too much."
The dealer shook his head slowly and sadly, but firmly.
"It's my price, madam - and if you admire the thing I think it
really might be yours. It's not too much. It's too little. It's almost
nothing. I can't go lower."
Charlotte, wondering, but resisting, bent over the bowl
again. "Then it's impossible. It's more than I can afford."
"Ah," the man returned, "one can sometimes afford for a
present more than one can afford for one's self."
He said it so coaxingly that she found herself going on
without, as might be said, putting him in his place. "Oh, of
course it would be only for a present -!"
"Then it would be a lovely one."
"Does one make a present," she asked, "of an object that
contains, to one's knowledge, a flaw?"
"Well, if one knows of it one has only to mention it. The
good faith," the man smiled, "is always there."
"And leave the person to whom one gives the thing, you
mean, to discover it?"
"He wouldn't discover it - if you're speaking of a
gentleman."
"I'm not speaking of anyone in particular," Charlotte
said.
"Well, whoever it might be. He might know - and he
might try. But he wouldn't find."
She kept her eyes on him as if, though unsatisfied,
mystified, she yet had a fancy for the Bowl. "Not even if the thing
should come to pieces?" And then, as he was silent: "Not even if
he should have to say to me, `The Golden Bowl is broken'?"
He was still silent; after which he had his strangest smile.
"Ah, if anyone should want to smash it -!"
She laughed; she almost admired the little man's
expression. "You mean one could smash it with a hammer?"
"Yes, if nothing else would do. Or perhaps even by
dashing it with violence - say upon a marble floor."
"Oh, marble floors -!" But she might have been thinking
- for they were a connection, marble floors; a connection with
many things: with her old Rome, and with his; with the palaces of
his past, and, a little, of hers; with the possibilities of his future,
with the sumptuosities of his marriage, with the wealth of the
Ververs. All the same, however, there were other things; and they
altogether held for a moment her fancy. "Does crystal then break
- when it is crystal? I thought its beauty was its hardness."
Her friend, in his way, discriminated. "Its beauty is its
being crystal. But its hardness is certainly its safety. It doesn't
break," he went on, "like vile glass. It splits - if there is a split."
"Ah!" - Charlotte breathed with interest. "If there is a
split." And she looked down again at the Bowl. "There is a split,
eh? Crystal does split, eh?"
"On lines and by laws of its own."
"You mean if there's a weak place?"
For all answer, after a hesitation, he took the bowl up
again, holding it aloft and tapping it with a key. It rang with the
finest, sweetest sound. "Where is the weak place?"
She then did the question justice. "Well, for me, only the
price. I'm poor, you see - very poor. But I thank you and I'll
think." The Prince, on the other side of the shop-window, had
finally faced about and, as to see if she hadn't done, was trying to
reach, with his eyes, the comparatively dim interior. "I like it,"
she said - "I want it. But I must decide what I can do."
The man, not ungraciously, resigned himself. "Well, I'll
keep it for you."
The small quarter of an hour had had its marked oddity -
this she felt even by the time the open air and the Bloomsbury
aspects had again, in their protest against the truth of her gathered
impression, made her more or less their own. Yet the oddity
might have been registered as small compared to the other effect
that, before they had gone much further, she had, with her
companion, to take account of. This latter was simply the effect of
their having, by some tacit logic, some queer inevitability, quite
dropped the idea of continued pursuit. They didn't say so, but it
was on the line of giving up Maggie's present that they practically
proceeded - the line of giving it up without more reference to it.
The Prince's first reference was in fact quite independently made.
"I hope you satisfied yourself, before you had done, of what was
the matter with that bowl."
"No indeed, I satisfied myself of nothing. Of nothing at
least but that the more I looked at it the more I liked it, and that if
you weren't so unaccomodating this would be just the occasion for
your giving me the pleasure of accepting it."
He looked graver for her, at this, than he had looked all
the morning. "Do you propose it seriously - without wishing to
play me a trick?"
She wondered. "What trick would it be?"
He looked at her harder. "You mean you really don't
know?"
"But know what?"
"Why, what's the matter with it. You didn't see, all the
while?"
She only continued, however, to stare. "How could you
see - out in the street?"
"I saw before I went out. It was because I saw that I did
go out. I didn't want to have another scene with you, before that
rascal, and I judged you would presently guess for yourself."
"Is he a rascal?" Charlotte asked. "His price is so
moderate." She waited but a moment. "Five pounds. Really so
little."
He continued to look at her. "Five pounds?"
"Five pounds."
He might have been doubting her word, but he was only,
it appeared, gathering emphasis. "It would be dear - to make a
gift of - at five shillings. If it had cost you even but five pence I
wouldn't take it from you."
"Then," she asked, "what is the matter?"
"Why, it has a crack."
It sounded, on his lips, so sharp, it had such an authority,
that she almost started, while her colour, at the word, rose. It was
as if he had been right, though his assurance was wonderful.
"You answer for it without having looked?"
"I did look. I saw the object itself. It told its story. No
wonder it's cheap."
"But it's exquisite. That's the danger."
Then a light visibly came to her - a light in which her
friend suddenly and intensely showed. The reflection of it, as she
smiled at him, was in her own face. "The danger - I see - is
because you're superstitious."
"Per Dio, I'm superstitious! A crack is a crack - and an
omen's an omen."
"You'd be afraid -?"
"Per Bacco!"
"For your happiness?"
"For my happiness."
"For your safety?"
"For my safety."
She just paused. "For your marriage?"
"For my marriage. For everything."
She thought again. "Thank goodness then that if there be
a crack we know it! But if we may perish by cracks in things that
we don't know -!" And she smiled with the sadness of it. "We
can never then give each other anything."
He considered it, but he met it. "Ah, but one does know.
I do, at least - an by instinct. I don't fail. That will always protect
me."
It was funny, the way he said such things; yet she liked
him, really, the more for it. They fell in for her with a general, or
rather with a special, vision. But she spoke with a mild despair.
"What then will protect me?"
"Where I'm concerned I will. From me at least you've
nothing to fear," he now quite amiably responded. "Anything you
consent to accept from me -" But he paused.
"Well?"
"Well, shall be perfect."
"That's very fine," she presently answered. "it's vain,
after all, for you to talk of my accepting things when you'll accept
nothing from me."
Ah, there, better still, he could meet her. "You attach an
impossible condition. That, I mean, of my keeping your gift so to
myself."
Well, she looked, before him there, at the condition -
then, abruptly, with a gesture, she gave it up. She had a
headshake of disenchantment - so far as the idea had appealed to
her. It all appeared too difficult. "Oh, my `condition' - I don't
hold to it. You may cry it on the housetops - anything I ever do."
"Ah well, then -!" This made, he laughed, all the
difference.
But it was too late. "Oh, I don't care now! I should have
liked the Bowl. But if that won't do there's nothing."
He considered this; he took it in, looking graver again;
but after a moment he qualified. "Yet I shall want some day to
give you something."
She wondered at him. "What day?"
"The day you marry. For you will marry. You must -
seriously - marry."
She took it from him, but it determined in her the only
words she was to have uttered, all the morning, that came out as if
a spring had been pressed. "To make you feel better?"
"Well," he replied frankly, wonderfully - "it will. But
here," he added, "is your hansom."
He had signalled - the cab was charging. She put out no
hand for their separation, but she prepared to get in. Before she
did so, however, she said what had been gathering while she
waited. "Well, I would marry, I think, to have something from
you in all freedom."

* *
*

[p. 255] "We must see the old king; we must `do' the cathedral,"
he said; "we must know all about it. If we coud but take," he
exhaled, "the full opportunity!" And then while, for all they
seemed to give him, he sounded again her eyes: "I feel the day like
a great gold cup that we must somehow drain together."
"I feel it, as you always make me feel everything, just as
you do; so that I know ten miles off how you feel! But you
remember," she asked, "à propos of great gold cups, the beautiful
one, the real one, that I offered you so long ago and that you
wouldn't have? Just before your marriage" - she brought it back to
him: "the gilded crystal bowl in the little Bloomsbury shop."
"Oh, yes!" - but it took, with a slight surprise on the
Prince's part, some small recollecting. "The treacherous cracked
thing you wanted to palm off on me, and the little swindling Jew
who understood Italian and who backed you up! But I feel this an
occasion," he immediately added, "and I hope you don't mean," he
smailed, "that as an occasion it's also cracked."
They spoke, naturally, more low than loud, overlooked as
they were, though at a respectful distance, by tiers of windows;
slowly and deeply absorbed. "Don't you think too much of
`cracks' and aren't you too afraid of them? I risk the cracks," said
Charlotte, "and I've often recalled the bowl and the little
swindling Jew, wondering if they've parted company. He made,"
she said, "a great impression on me.
"Well, you also, no doubt, made a great impression on
him, and I dare say that if you were to go back to him you'd find
he has been keeping that treasure for you. But as to cracks," the
Prince went on - "what did you tell me the other day you prettily
call them in English? `rifts within the lute'? - risk them as much
as you like for yourself, but don't risk them for me."

*
* *

[p. 402] "I was very happy then," said Maggie.
"Yes - we thought you so gay and so brilliant." Fanny
felt it feeble, but she went on. "we were so glad you were happy."
Maggie stood a moment, at first only looking at her.
"You thought me all right, eh?"
"Surely, dearest; we thought you all right."
"Well, I daresay it was natural; but in point of fact I
never was more wrong in my life. For, all the while, if you please,
this was brewing."
Mrs. Assingham indulged, as nearly as possible to
luxury, her vagueness. "`This' - ?"
"That!" replied the Princess, whose eyes, her companion
now saw, had turned to an object on the chimneypiece of the
room, of which, among so many precious objects - the Ververs,
wherever they might be, always revelled peculiarly in matchless
old mantel-ornaments - her visitor had not taken heed.
"Do you mean the gilt cup?"
"I mean the gilt cup."
The piece now recognized by Fanny as new to her own
vision was a capacious bowl, of old-looking, rather strikingly
yellow gold, mounted, by a short stem, on an ample foot, which
held a central position above the fireplace, where, to allow it the
better to show, a clearance had been made of other objects, notably
of the Louis-Seize clock that accompanied the candelabra. This
latter trophy ticked at present on the marble slab of a commode
that exactly matched it in splendour and style.Mrs. Assingham
took it, the bowl, as a fine thing; but the question was obviously
not of its intrinsic value, and she kept off from it, admiring it at a
distance. "But what has that to do -?"
"It has everything. You'll see." With which again,
however, for the moment, Maggie attached her strange wide eyes.
"He knew her before - before I had ever seen him."
"`He' knew -?" But Fanny, while she cast about her for
the links she missed, could only echo it.
"Amerigo knew Charlotte - more than I ever dreamed."

* *
*

[p. 406] Mrs. Assingham thought. "The more danger then of his
coming in and finding me here. I don't know, you see, what you
now consider that you've ascertained; nor anything of the
connection with it of that object that you declare so damning."
Her eyes rested on this odd acquisition and then quitted it, went
back to it and again turned from it: it was inscrutable in its rather
stupid elegance, and yet, from the moment one had thus appraised
it, vivid and definite in its domination of the scene. Fanny could
no more overlook it now than she could have overlooked a lighted
Christmas-tree; but nervously and all in vain she dipped into her
mind for some floating reminiscence of it. At the same time that
this attempt left her blank she understood a good deal, she even
not a little shared, the Prince's mystic apprehension. The golden
bowl put on, under consideration, a sturdy, a conscious perversity;
as a "document", somehow,it was ugly, though it might have a
decorative grace.

* *
*

[p. 408] Mrs. Assingham, at this, went closer to the cup on the
chimney - quite liking to feel that she did so, moreover, without
going closer to her companion's vision. She looked at the
precious thing - if precious it was - found herself in fact eyeing it
as if, by her dim solicitation, to draw its secret from it rather than
suffer the imposition of Maggie's knowledge. It was brave and
rich and firm, with its bold deep hollow; and, without this queer
torment about it, would, thanks to her love of plenty of yellow,
figure to her as an enviable ornament, a possession really
desirable. She didn't touch it, but if after a minute she turned
away from it the reason was, rather oddly and suddenly, in her
fear of doing so. "Then it all depends on the bowl? I mean your
future does? For that's what it comes to, I judge."

* *
*

[p. 414] She stood there with her eyes on the street while Mrs.
Assingham's reverted to that complicating object on the chimney
as to which her condition, so oddly even to herself, was that of
both recurrent wonder and recurrent protest. She went over it,
looked at it afresh and yielded now to her impulse to feel it in her
hands. She laid them on it, lifting it up, and was surprised, thus,
with the weight of it - she had seldom handled so much massive
gold. That effect somehow prompted her to further freedom and
presently to saying: "I don't believe in this, you know."
It brought Maggie round to her. "Don't believe in it?
You will when I tell you."
"Ah, tell me nothing! I won't have it," said Mrs.
Assingham. She kept the cup in her hand, held it there in a
manner that gave Maggie's attention to her, she saw the next
moment, a quality of excited suspense. This suggested to her,
oddly, that she had, with the liberty she was taking, an air of
intention, and the impression betrayed by her companion's eyes
grew more distinct in a word of warning. "It's of value, but its
value's impaired, I've learned, by a crack."
"A crack? -in the gold-?"
"It isn't gold." With which, somewhat strangely, Maggie
smiled. "That's the point."
"What is it then?"
"It's glass - and cracked, under the gilt, as I say, at that."
"Glass? - of this weight?"
"Well," said Maggie, "it's crystal - and was once, I
suppose, precious. But what," she then asked, "do you mean to do
with it?"
She had come away from her window, one of the three by
which the wide room, enjoying an advantageous "back",
commanded the western sky and caught a glimpse of the evening
flush; while Mrs. Assingham, possessed of the bowl, and
possessed too of this indication of a flaw, approached another for
the benefit of the slowly-fading light. Here, thumbing the
singular piece, weighing it, turning it over, and growing suddenly
more conscious, above all, of an irresistible impulse, she presently
spoke again. "A crack? Then your whole idea has a crack."
Maggie, by this time at some distance from her, waited a
moment. "If you mean by my idea the knowledge that has come
to me that -"
But Fanny, with decision, had already taken her up.
"There's only one knowledge that concerns us - one fact with
which we can have anything to do."
"Which one, then?"
"The fact that your husband has never, never, never -!"
But the very gravity of this statement, which she raised her eyes to
her friend across the room, made her for an instant hang fire.
"Well, never what?"
"Never been half so interested in you as now. But don't
you, my dear, really feel that?"
Maggie considered. "Oh, I think what I've told you helps
me to feel it. His having to-day given up even his forms; his
keeping away from me; his not having come." And she shook her
head as against all easy glosses. "It is because of that, you know."
"Well then, if it's because of this -!" And Fanny
Assingham, who had been casting about her and whose
inspiration decidedly had come, raised the cup in her two hands,
raised it positively above her head, and from under it, solemnly,
smiled at the Princess as a signal of intention. So for an instant,
full of her thought and of her act, she held the precious vessel, and
then, with due note taken of the margin of the polished floor, bare,
fine and hard in the embrasure of her window, she dashed it
boldly to the ground, where she had the thrill of seeing it, with the
violence of the crash, lie shattered. She had flushed with the force
of her effort, as Maggie had flushed with wonder at the sight, and
this high reflection in their faces was all that passed between them
for a minute more. After which, "Whatever you meant by it - and
I don't want to know now - has ceased to exist," Mrs. Assingham
said.
"And what in the world, my dear, did you mean by it?" -
that sound, as at the touch of a spring, rang out as the first effect
of Fanny's speech. It broke upon the two women's absorption with
a sharpness almost equal to the smash of the crystal, for the door
of the room had been opened by the Prince without their taking
heed. He had apparently had time, moreover, to catch the
conclusion of Fanny's act; his eyes attached themselves, through
the large space allowing just there, as happened, a free view, to
the shining fragments at this lady's feet. His question had been
addressed to his wife, but he moved his eyes immediately
afterwards to those of her visitor, whose own then held them in a
manner of which neither party had been capable, doubtless, for
mute penetration, since the hour spent by him in Cadogan place
on the eve of his marriage and the afternoon of Charlotte's
reappearance. Something now again became possible for these
communicants, under the intensity of their pressure, something
that took up that tale and that might have been a redemption of
pledges then exchanged. This rapid play of suppressed appeal and
disguised response lasted indeed long enough for more results
than one - long enough for Mrs. Assingham to measure the feat of
quick self-recovery, possibly therefore of recognition still more
immediate, accompanying Amerigo's vision and estimate of the
evidence with which she had been - so admirably, she felt as she
looked at him - inspired to deal. She looked at him and looked at
him - there were so many things she wanted, on the spot, to say.
But Maggie was looking too - and was moreover looking at them
both; so that these things, for the elder woman, quickly enough
reduced themselves to one. She met his question - not too late,
since, in their silence, it had remained in the air. Gathering
herself to go, leaving the golden bowl split into three pieces on the
ground, she simply referred him to his wife. She should see them
later, they would all meet soon again; and meanwhile, as to what
Maggie had meant - she said, in her turn, from the door - why,
Maggie herself was doubtless by this time ready to tell him.

[From Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot]:

[p. 530] But at this point an incident took place, and the speaker's
eloquence was cut short in the most unexpected manner.
This wild tirade, this rush of strange and agitated words
and confused, enthusiastic ideas, which seemed tripping each
other up and tumbling over one another in confusion, all seemed
suggestive of something ominous in the mental condition of the
young man who had broken out so suddenly, apropos of nothing.
Those present who knew Myshkin wondered apprehensively (and
some of them with shame) at this outbreak, which was so out of
keeping with his habitual diffidence and restraint, with his rare
and peculiar tact in some cases, and his instinctive feeling for real
propriety. They could not understand what it was due to. What
had been told him about Pavlishtchev could not have been the
cause of it. The ladies gazed at him from their corner, as though
he had taken leave of his senses, and Princess Byelokonsky
confessed afterwards that in another minute she would have taken
to her heels. The old gentlemen were almost disconcerted in their
first amazement; the chief of the department looked sternly and
with displeasure at him from his place. The colonel of engineers
sat in absolute immobility. The German positively turned pale,
but still smiled his artificial smile, looking at the rest of the
company to see how they were taking it. But all this and the
whole "scandal" might have ended in the most ordinary and
natural way in another minute. General Epanchin, who was
extremely astonished, though he grasped the situation sooner than
the rest, had made several attempts to stop Myshkin already. But
failing in his efforts, he was making his way towards him, with a
firm and resolute design. In another minute, he would perhaps,
had it been necessary, have taken the extreme step of leading
Myshkin out of the room in a friendly way on the pretext of his
being ill, which would, perhaps, have been the truth, and which
the general fully believed himself... But the scene had a very
different conclusion.
At the beginning, when Myshkin had first entered the
drawing-room, he had seated himself as far as possible from the
china vase about which Aglaia had so scared him. It seems
almost beyond belief, but after Aglaia's words the day before a
haunting conviction, a prodigious and incredible presentiment
obsessed him that he would be sure to break the vase next day,
however carefully he kept away from it and tried to avoid the
disaster. But so it was. In the course of the evening other and
brighter impressions had flowed into his soul: we have spoken of
that already. He forgot his presentiment. When he had heard
Pavishtchev's name mentioned, and General Epanchin had
brought him forward and introduced him again to Ivan Petrovitch,
he moved nearer to the table and sat down in the very armchair
nearest to the huge and handsome china vase, which stood on a
pedestal almost at his elbow and a little behind him.
At his last words he suddenly rose from his seat, and
incautiously waved his arm, somehow twitching his shoulder
and... there was a general scream of horror! The vase tottered at
first, as though hesitating whether to fall on the head of some old
gentleman, but suddenly inclining in the opposite direction,
towards the German poet, who skipped aside in alarm, it crashed
to the ground. A crash, a scream, and the priceless fragments
were scattered about the carpet, dismay and astonishment - what
was Myshkin's condition would be hard, and perhaps it is
unnecessary, to describe! But we must not omit to mention one
odd sensation, which struck him at that very minute, and stood out
clearly above the mass of other confused and strange sensations.
It was not the shame, not the scandal, not the fright, nor the
suddenness of it that impressed him most, but his foreknowledge
of it! He could not explain what was so arresting about that
thought, he only felt that it had gripped him to the heart, and he
stood still in a terror that was almost superstitious! Another
instant and everything seemed opening out before him; instead of
horror there was light, joy, and ecstasy; his breath began to fail
him, and... but the moment had passed. Thank God, it was not
that! He drew a breath and looked about him.


It is the devout hope of Pernicious the Musquodoboit Harbour Farm Cat
that, having perused these marvelous excerpts, Patrons will be moved to go
out and purchase the books from which they have been taken, to experience
in full the rich beauties of which these are but the opalescent,
iridescent shards...

[Dromio]

I sent a message out about the spirituality newsletter that I
am working on producing, I got a little intrest in it, but not much, I
am just about to send out the first issue of it, anyone who would like
to take a look at it can get in touch with me (the information is
below). The subscription rate is curently $5.00 (Canadian), for four
issues. That is anywhere in the world. I will probably be sending
out a few free issues this time, but I am unlikely to continue doing
so for people who do request them.
I am also looking for submissions for the next issue, if you
are at all intrested in writing anything about spirituality I can send
off a copy of the current issue, and you can look at what we curently
have. I do hope that some of you people are intrested, I know that
there are a few people here who are intrested in spirituality.

> E-Mail: rra...@awinc.com (the addresss used in this message so you can
> just reply)
> Fax: (250) 362-9668
> Mail: Jason Rasku
> Box 270
> Rossland BC
> V0G 1Y0
> Canada

Jason Rasku